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- GBO-Possum
How to appeal to stupid people...
America - The Official Thread
- Thread starter ///M-Spec
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UKMikey
Premium
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- UKMikeyA
- UKMikeyA
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If you voted Trump, you are a ****tard.
- 29,336
- Glasgow
- GTP_Mars
Trump is an ignorant ERS-hole.
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- 13,896
- Adelaide
- Neomone
Rofl. So you're gonna tax citizens of other countries. And when they don't pay, you're gonna what? Invade them? Throw them out a window? Fill their undies with anthrax?
Trump lives in a fairy land where everyone bows down and does whatever he wants no matter if it even makes sense. I strongly suspect he's going to get a rude awakening when the rest of the world who doesn't think that he's an amazing genius tells him to wedge it sideways up his pooter.
Other countries are willing to work with even the daftest presidents as long as it makes sense for them, but becoming a vassal state is not it.
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- 3,051
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- GBO-Possum
"Israel and Hamas reach a Gaza ceasefire agreement"
How many minutes before Trump claims credit for Biden's achievement?
How many minutes before Trump claims credit for Biden's achievement?
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- Blitzbay
- Blitzbay
Maximum pressure caused them to fear what I will do to them if they didn't resolve it.
- 4,616
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- GTP_MooCow
At least 4 years of pure comedy.... Crying isn't gonna help, might as well laugh while we get more miserable....
Keef
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Mike Turner R from Ohio has been fired from his spot as chairman of the intelligence committee. Orders from Trump apparently. This is most likely bad news for Dayton, Ohio, and the US as a whole. Turner has humongous support in Dayton and Wright Patterson AFB area as he's brought a ton of funding and STEM jobs to the area and increased the importance of WPAFB considerably. He's still on the armed services committee so not all is lost but by all personal accounts Turner was very engaged and great to work with here at the base.
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I mean this with no disrespect or hostility towards him, as I've always enjoyed reading his posts, but the results/aftermath of the 2024 elections has seemed to break the brains of a lot of people, and Danoff might be one of them. By that, I don't mean excessive anger or fear toward Trump (which would be justified), but an inability to cogently understand why the election happened the way it did. I remember over the summer, when Biden suspended his bid for presidency, he was very optimistic and venerated Biden as a hero for doing so, yet in November, he seemed to be "blackpilled", believing that the Democrats would lose from the beginning and there was nothing that could have been done to mitigate that. He seems to believe that forces akin to the "indivisible hand" in economics have moved the electorate rightward as well as given rise to Trump in recent years.
I'll even go as far to say that his general ideology as a right-libertarian is ill-equipped to grapple with this question. Although the policy preferences of the median voter are hard to generalize (and are often contradictory or irrational when bundled together), it seems clear that the political feasibility of neoliberalism in the modern US is at an all time low. Yes, while it should be obvious to anyone that the economy is not a zero-sum game, it's also not an infinite-sum game either, and I think this worldview fails to fully realize the downstream effects of massive and growing inequality throughout society, even if the total amount of wealth in the US, and standards of living for poor Americans is at an all-time high. Neoliberalism really doesn't concern itself with inequality. It's fair to say that the median voter prefers economic change over status quo, borne out by political trends since the 2016 primaries (maybe even as early as the financial crisis), and much of this sentiment is the product of ever-apparent inequality throughout society, which breeds populism.
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- 13,896
- Adelaide
- Neomone
To be fair, this all sounds a lot like an invisible hand of economic and social forces influencing people to behave in certain ways, does it not?
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- GTP_Famine
The two things seem unrelated. Atheists aren't ill-equipped to deal with questions on theology...
I think we all understand why the election went the way that it did. However, the fact that a full quarter of the entire US population will wave American flags while voting for the person most overtly dismantling American institutions - with a track record of obscene disregard for Americans (particularly his voter base) and for anything except self-enrichment and cosying up with the richest and most powerful people in the world - when they shouldn't have even been able to vote for the guy anyway is more of a question of how.
The USA is supposed to have checks and balances to prevent the rise of a dictator, but has somehow walked right into it - willingly for more than a third of voters and apathetically for another third - and probably killed itself. That's what's broken a lot of brains, and not in terms of inability to understand but simple aghastment with how easily something that shouldn't be possible has happened with someone who is self-evidently a gibbering moron - like, not even an evil genius, but a ****-smeared heart attack in a golf cart - and how many people have lined up to be a part of it even knowing that those who were part of it the first time round were used and discarded faster than McDonald's ketchup sachets.
Scaff
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It's an interesting point, and while it is almost certainly a multi-layered failure, a few things stand out to me.
Most check-and-balance systems fail because they haven't been tested to ensure they work. I would put the US in this pot, as the times its system has been tested are very few and far between.
Many of the checks and balances in the US rely very heavily on 'good' people doing the 'right' thing, and doing so for the good of the country. It placed far too much weight on initial voters not voting for a threat to the nation (repeatedly), too much weight on the members of the Senate and Congress putting country first, and far too much weight on the SCOTUS not becoming a partisan body to the degree that it will ignore the constitution. That's without looking at the failure that is the President's ability to stack almost all levels of the Judiciary with partisan individuals who will also happily put the Nation second.
It was blatantly clear that the US system of checks and balances was not working as it should following Trumps' first term, and the system wasn't fit to self-correct or corrected while he was out of office, resulting in four years of one side being unwilling/unable/unaware to fix it, and the other side actively working to continue undermining it. The first failure undermined the system, the second may well irretrievably break it.
To quote Sinclair Lewis...
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
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- driftking18594
- CiaranGTR94
When you think of libertarian principles, the first two things that comes to mind are:
- A hatred of state intervention.
- Believing in the inherent will of individuals to act in their own best interests.
Instead, the Internet has become the ultimate flooded zone of crap. You have people taking horse dewormer instead of getting vaccinated. You have a prospective Secretary of Defense who won't wash his hands in case that the soap is actually a Ukrainian bioweapon. You have suburbanites lining up to buy pavement princess trucks to shuttle them between home, the kids' school, their office and their favourite strip malls. You have the world's richest man readily spreading Russian propaganda, and a man with half his net worth deciding that misinformation is good for business.
How does right-libertarianism get the US out of that?
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I don't think either of those things are true.
I'd say "distrust" for the first - only anarchists hate state intervention and want exactly none of it - and for the latter it's more a case of accepting that individuals do and should act in their own interests (whether they are the best interests or not), with information a more valuable part of the process than legislation and incarceration.
But of course there are Big-L and small-l libertarians.
